Name Above All Names

3 So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. 4 Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.

This is one of my favorite verses in John because John is the one that outran him. Kind of love that, right? Just had to slip that in. And they get there, and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he didn't go in. But Simon Peter came following him and went into the tomb:

6 and he saw the linen cloths lying there, 7 and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself.

Those details matter. The burial cloths are still there, but they are folded. This isn't the scene of a robbery. A thief doesn't unwrap a body and then take the time to fold the linens and tidy up. Something else has happened in this tomb. Something the cloths can't explain.

8 Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.

Oh, what a great moment this is for John. He begins to believe that something has happened. And then John clarifies — for as yet they did not understand the Scripture that he must rise from the dead. This was the first moment when it really clicked for John, because everything Jesus had been saying — and he had been claiming this a lot in the weeks leading up to his death — they didn't want to hear it. In fact, Peter had rebuked Jesus. Imagine that — rebuking the Son of God. "Stop saying that, Jesus." But Jesus had been very clear: the Son of Man must die that he might be raised up. They didn't quite want to believe it. They didn't understand it until this moment. John is the first to grasp it, and he begins to believe.

And then it says, interestingly, that the disciples went back to their homes. So Peter and John, they had come running, they get there, John is beginning to believe something is happening, and they are like, "All right, I guess we are going to go home." I am not judging them — I don't know what else they were supposed to do. But they go home.

But Mary — and I do love this — Mary stays. It says:

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.

She looks in and sees this slab of stone like an altar with two angels on each end facing each other, which if you understand the Hebrew scriptures is a clear picture of the ark of the covenant – the mercy seat. This is now sacred space. This tomb has become a meeting of the heavens and the earth. Something supernatural, something incredible has taken place.

13 They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him."

Mary says it twice — first to the disciples, then to the angels. "They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him." Mary is not yet looking for a risen Savior. She is looking for a body to anoint. She is looking for a corpse to grieve. She came to do one last thing for the one that she trusted and loved, and even that is now being denied her.

14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."

This is an amazing moment. And ironically, her supposition that He is the gardener is a great one. He is the ultimate gardener. He is the ultimate author of life. He is the one who has opened the way back to the original garden, back to the presence of God. But she thinks He is just there to pull some weeds. And she says to Him, "If you carried him away, sir, tell me where they have laid him so that I can take him away. I will take care of him."

16 Jesus said to her, "Mary."

I want you to think about this. The first recorded word of the resurrected King is him calling someone by name. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that actually really appropriate?

He doesn't call her disciple. He doesn't call her woman. He calls her Mariam. He doesn't use the Greek formal address. He uses the Aramaic idiom Mariam. It's what her mother would have called her. It's what an intimate friend and ally would call her. Jesus calls to her. And in that moment, everything changes for Mary. In that moment, she hears his voice. In that moment, she sees his face and she knows exactly who he is.

So she turns to him and says in Aramaic, "Raboni," which means teacher. Rabbi is the traditional form of teacher, but Raboni is again a different, intimate address. This is not saying, "Oh, hey, it's the teacher." This is, "This is my teacher. This is the one that I've been following. This is the one that I am walking for and walking with," and looking to, as she cries out "Raboni." I want you to hold on to that — the fact that the first word that the risen Christ speaks is a name. There's something significant in that. And she calls out to him, "Teacher."

And then Jesus says to her — and this is interesting —

17 Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Do not cling to Me." Actually, in the way that the sentence is constructed, He's really saying, "Stop clinging to Me," which you can understand. She recognizes Him and what does she do? She rushes forward and she grabs on to Him. She's holding on to Him. She can't believe it — she came to the tomb to mourn and she found a risen, resurrected Christ. And He says, "No, no, you can't hold on to me right now. I still have some things to do." He says, "I have not yet ascended to My Father. Go tell my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God. Don't cling to what was, because something new is happening now."

18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her.

"I have seen the Lord." Five words. The first resurrection proclamation in human history from the voice of a human is not from Peter or from John or from any of the other disciples, but from a woman who stayed when everyone else went home. "I have seen the Lord." The same title she used in grief — Lord — now spoken in an entirely different key. What began as mourning has become proclamation. He's not in the tomb, for He has risen.

Let me step back for a moment, because some of you have been with us for this entire Lent series, and some of you are just coming in this morning, and I want us all to be on the same page. For the past forty days, the last six weeks, we've walked through a series called Idol, thinking about idolatry — which means we've really been thinking about the human heart, because whatever has the heart has our life. And the heart is a tricky thing. The heart is something that must be guarded, because the heart has a relentless tendency to take good things and turn them into ultimate things. Hearts reach out for significance and security, for identity and for control. And idolatry is what we call it when a heart reaches to something else to give what only God can give.

So week after week we've been thinking and wrestling with this, and I've said it this way over and over again — we become what we behold. What we direct our hearts to, what we align ourselves to, what we focus on — we are shaped by the things that we serve. We become what we behold. We begin to resemble the things that we revere and worship. Simply put, we are being formed by whatever we orient our lives around. The things that we look to, the things that we trust, the things that hold our loyalty are shaping us. The question is never whether I am being formed. We're always being formed. The question is, what am I being formed by, and what am I being formed to?

What we've seen in this series is that idols promise so much and deliver so little, and in the process idols do something to us. They hurt us. They distort us. They dehumanize us. Idols make us less than human. They promise to make us more, but they quietly make us less. They promise to fill us, but they hollow us out. Because you and I were made to bear one image and one image alone. We were made and designed to be imagers of the living God. And every time we bow to an idol that is not the living God, we're bent. We're corrupted. We are lessened. We become what we behold.

This gives us the diagnosis of what happens when we engage in idolatry, and at the very same time gives us the prognosis — the solution, how to get better. It points us to the gospel. If idols dehumanize us when we direct and orient our lives toward them and worship the created rather than the Creator, the same is just as true in reverse: when we direct our lives toward the Creator in whose image we are made, we are rehumanized. That's exactly what Jesus came to do. Jesus came to restore that which has been taken and broken within us — to rehumanize us. That's what we're celebrating this morning at Easter. This is what Jesus came to do.

And the way that he does it is so beautiful and so important — so counter to the way of the world. Jesus doesn't come grasping. We were in this last week, and in fact I want to go back there right now to Philippians chapter 2. Jesus doesn't come according to the power structures of this world. He shows us a different way. In Philippians chapter 2, Paul writes this unbelievable tribute to Jesus:

1 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 2 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 3 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 4 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 5 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 6 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow —

Every knee will bow in the heavens, on the earth, under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is — there's that word again — Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Jesus comes to rehumanize us. Jesus comes to restore all that has been broken and destroyed by sin and the fruit of sin, death. But He comes and He does it in such an unexpected way.

We already read this in verse six. Even though He was in the form of God, even though He's always been and always shared the essential nature — He is God — He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. We dug into this word last week. Grasp in the Greek is harpagmos. It means to seize, to snatch, to take by force. That's how we do things in the world. We see something, we want it, we take it. Might makes right. Now Jesus certainly had the might. He could have seized it. He could have snatched it. He could have come with a legion of ninja angels. But he doesn't. He refuses to do what everyone who came before him did.

See, this is the story of scripture. It's the story of humanity — the story of seizing. Right from the very beginning of the scriptures, Eve saw the fruit and she took it. And that pattern is repeated over and over and over again in my life and in yours. We see it and we take it. We want it. This is the fundamental problem underneath all forms of idolatry, and it's the lived experience of all humanity. We try to grasp for ourselves what can only be given by God. Jesus won't do that.

Idolatry is what we call that seizing. And Paul says Jesus — the one being in the entire history of the cosmos who actually had the right to grasp, who possessed the very nature of God, for whom equality with God was not a presumption but a reality — He didn't do it. He looked at everything He had and He let it go. But here's what I want you to see this morning that I didn't unpack last week. In the next verse, it says:

7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Paul doesn't just say what Jesus refuses. He says what Jesus did instead.

The word Paul uses here is the Greek word lambano. So instead of harpagmos — grasping or seizing — Jesus, in the English here, is taking. But lambano is an interesting word. It can either mean receiving or taking depending on the context. Paul is being very intentional in his word choices here. What he is saying is this: Jesus received from God, willingly taking from God what He was given, even though it was an unbelievable trajectory of descent. Jesus did not have His life, His ministry, His death, and His resurrection imposed upon Him. He didn't reluctantly surrender to it. He received it. He took it as His chosen form, actively and willingly. The incarnation is not Jesus being dragged downward. It is Jesus opening His hands and receiving.

We always want to seize and reach up. Jesus released and reached down. These two words sitting in two verses but one sentence are the entire difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, and every idol ever built. Idolatry at its core says, let's grasp, let's make something for ourselves of ourselves. Jesus said, "I'll receive whatever the Father wants to give Me, and if He gives Me the form of a servant, I'll take it. If He gives me the form of a human, I'll take it. If He leads me to death, I'll go." And that's exactly where He goes.

Jesus receives it all the way down. He doesn't stop at inconvenience. He doesn't stop at discomfort. He doesn't stop at suffering. He takes it all the way.

8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

I was talking to some people this week and they said, "Oh, are you going to watch The Passion of the Christ this week?" Honestly, I watched it once. That was enough for me. Crucifixion — the Romans loved death. They were really good at it. They didn't just want to kill somebody. They wanted to hurt them. They wanted to make them suffer. It took them a while to figure out how to kill somebody with the most pain and the most shame over the most amount of time effectively, and they mastered it. Jesus goes to the cross, the most shameful, degrading, public form of execution the world ever devised, reserved by the Romans for slaves and rebels and the lowest of the low.

So you see the trajectory that Paul is painting here. Jesus goes from the fullness of God, the morphe of God, the highest of highs, to the lowest of lows. That's how far his open hand takes him. And then it says, "Therefore." In the Greek it's dia, and it connects everything that follows to everything that came before. It means that what's coming afterwards couldn't have come without what came before. That letting go, that refusal to seize, that emptying and the openness of Jesus's hand to go where the Father took him — that is what was required to get what's coming next. And it says,

9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,

So here's the question. What does the Father do with the Son who refuses to grasp? What does the Father give to the One who opens His hand and releases rather than trying to seize? How does the Father respond to the One who walks by faith and not by sight? The text says that the Father fills His hands. The Father rewards Him. It says the Father fills the open hands with — and this might be surprising — the greatest thing that God can put in his hands: the name that is above every other name. I need you to understand what Paul is saying here, because in the ancient world, especially in this biblical context —

In the biblical world, a name is not just what we call you. A name is the concentrated expression of identity and authority and significance of the individual. To have a great name is to have your place established, to be known, to matter, to have and hold and exercise power. This is so deep that at the time of Jesus, most of the ancient Israelites would not refer to God by his revealed name. They would refer to God most often by calling him Ha Shem — Ha Shem, which means "the name." This is how the Jews of Jesus's time referred to the Creator, because they felt that they could not speak his name without desecrating it in some way. They just referred to him as the name.

So in this context, Paul writes that because Jesus did what He did, because He didn't seize, because He received what the Father puts in His hands, God has put in His hands the name that is above every other name. What a beautiful thing this is.

10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

So that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth. That is a purpose clause in the Greek — "so that." God does this for the purpose of every knee bowing. Every knee: physical knees, human knees, spiritual knees, angelic knees if they have such a thing, living knees, dead knees — that's the under the earth. Every knee is going to bow.

It says this,

11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

"And every tongue confess." Confess what? That Jesus is the Christ. This is not His last name. Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus is the Anointed One. That Jesus, the anointed Messiah, is Lord — Lord to the glory of God the Father. This is saying that what Jesus is given is the approval and authority of God to reign and to rule. Not over one people, not over one place, not over a specific time period — over anything and everything. Because Jesus didn't seize, because He opened and received, God puts it all in His hands.

The resurrection is the event by which the Father confirms that name. Easter Sunday, Easter morning, is not simply Jesus surviving death. It is the Father's public vindication of everything the Son refused to do. It is the Father saying to every power, every principality, every idol that has ever claimed a throne, "You're not it. He's it. This is my Son, and I'm giving Him the name." The open hands receive the name above every name.

I want to show you this morning — and this is just a quick journey back to Genesis — that this idea of a name is not out of the blue. It is actually a part of the whole story. I want to show you this by taking you to a construction site. Genesis 11 contains one of the strangest, shortest stories in the Bible. It says this:

1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

It starts out pretty casually. All of mankind is together. There is a unifying language, a sense of unity — one language, one people, one location. On the surface, this sounds like a really good thing: unity, cooperation, progress. They are going to start building. What could go wrong?

4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

They said, "Come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens." This is what we tend to focus on in the story. We call it the tower of Babel, and that is what they are building. But it is not just a tower — it is a city and a tower, and it is a city and a tower built for a purpose. You have to keep reading. Let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, so that we can make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

The Babel project in its essence is not primarily an architectural ambition. It is a name project, a significance project, a value and preeminence project. They want to establish themselves. They want to be known. They want to matter. They want to establish their place in the world apart from what God says — they want it on their own terms. Let us make a name for ourselves. This is harpagmos on a civilizational level. And we are only in Genesis 11 here, but it is already echoing back to the beginning. In Genesis 1, God says, "Let us make man in our own image," (Genesis 1:26) and then God blesses them. The phrase "let us make" here is the exact same phrase and word from Genesis 1. It is an intentional echo. The creature is now mimicking the Creator's act but redirecting it inwardly toward themselves. They are grasping for a name.

And notice the fear underneath it: "lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth" — lest we disappear into insignificance. The whole tower project is being driven by anxiety. We wouldn't know anything about anxiety in our culture today! The grasping for a name is what you do when you are terrified by your very existence. I want you to think about that for a moment, because this is not an ancient feeling. I think it is as contemporary as it gets. The relentless need to establish yourself, to be seen, to be known, to build something that will last, that says I was here and I mattered. I am not nothing.

Every social media platform is simply a redo of Babel, whether it is LinkedIn or Facebook or any of these other things. “Look at me. Look what I've done. Look what I've accomplished. Look what I've accumulated. Look at me.” And we know it is not reality because nobody puts their failures on their LinkedIn. Nobody takes pictures of the things that didn't turn out well, because we want to make a name. We want everyone to respect and recognize us. We want to make a name for ourselves.

It says the Lord said,

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

God says they're going to keep going down this road and it's not going to go well. This is actually a statement of grace and mercy. And it says, "Come, let us go down." There's a wonderful little detail there. God says, "Come, let us go down." They're trying to build a tower up into the sky to show how great they are, how much they control, how significant they are — and God has to go down even just to see it. He says, "Let's go down, and we'll confuse their language so that they might not understand one another's speech." And so the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. The very thing they were afraid of — they built Babel so that they would not be dispersed — and building Babel is actually what caused them to be dispersed. Be very careful what you ask for and what you try to do.

What Babel does is what every idol does, and every idolator tries to seize and secure significance and value and identity and meaning on their own terms. And here's the reality: the grasped name will always collapse under its own weight. This is the pattern. It has always been the pattern. You cannot make yourself great. You cannot give yourself a name. It has to be bestowed upon you by the one who made you.

So this is an interesting story because it looks like, on one level, God has failed. God made mankind for himself. God desired to dwell in intimacy with his imagers. God wanted mankind to walk by faith and find their significance, find their identity, find their place with and in him. And now mankind, as a whole, as a unity, has said, "No, we'll try something else. We want to make a name for ourselves. We'll grasp it for ourselves." And so God scatters them. He confuses their language. He disinherits them. He takes them to different places and establishes their borders. In that disinheritance, he places them under the authority of the divine counsel and the sons of God, and He disperses them — and it looks like God has failed. But God doesn't give up. God will never give up. Our pride, our sin, our seizing is not greater than God's ability to reclaim and restore for himself what He always intended us to be.

So the story doesn't end at Babel. Where does it go? The very next chapter — what is the very first thing God does? He calls for himself Abram, to make for himself a people. Genesis 12, verse one:

1 Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you."

Abram and his wife Sarai are living in his father's house, in his father's land, worshiping his father's gods. And God comes to him — and this is not just Abram, it's Abram and Sarai. They've been married for a long time and they are infertile and have no children. And God comes to them and says, "If you go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you, I will make of you a great nation." So the couple that can't have kids — "I'm going to turn you into a great nation." And then, "I will bless you." What does God say he will do? "I will make your name great." You cannot miss the connection to Babel here. At Babel they said, "We're going to make our name great." And — forgive me, I can't resist — make Babel great again. And that does not go well. Let him who has ears hear and listen. Even if you use the Lord's name, you cannot make your name great through the weapons of this world.

God scatters and disperses, disinherits, and then says, "But I'm not giving up." So He calls Abram and Sarah — not because of what they had to offer. They had nothing to offer. In fact, He tells them later, "I didn't choose you because you were strong. I chose you because you were weak. I chose you because you were so insignificant that when I'm done doing what I'm going to do through you, everybody will say, 'Well, only God could have pulled that off.'" And God says, "That's the point. I'll make your name great."

And then there is another significant difference. God says, "So that you will be a blessing." Babel wanted to make their name great for themselves. God says, "I'm going to make your name great for everyone else." The condition God puts upon Abram receiving the name and being blessed is not achievement, not accomplishment, not ascent — it's departure. Go from your country. Go from your kindred. Go from your father's house. Release what you have. Trust me, and I will fill your hands.

The name received rather than seized is always outward facing. Verse three says:

3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

The rest of Scripture from Genesis 12 on is the unfolding of that promise, and its fulfillment is what we are celebrating today in the resurrection of Jesus. What Abram received in shadow, Jesus receives fully. Jesus is the ultimate Abraham — the final, complete, perfect fulfillment of everything Abraham received. Jesus goes further than Abraham ever could. Abraham left his country; Jesus left the heavens. Abraham released his inheritance; Jesus released the very form of God itself. Abraham trusted God with his future; Jesus trusted the Father all the way to a cross. This is the pattern: seizing refused, receiving chosen, descent with open hands.

The Father, just as He did with Abraham but infinitely more, gives Jesus not a name, but the name — not a great name, not a famous name, not the name of a patriarch or a king of an empire, but the name above every name, the Divine name itself given to the Son who would not grasp. That is who we are celebrating this morning. That is what we are celebrating this morning. It is why the resurrection is not just a miracle. It is a verdict. It is the Father's public declaration over the Son who descended: “you refused to seize, so I am giving you everything.” Easter morning is the open hands of Jesus filled with the name that Babel could never build and Abraham only received in promise. The whole story has been pointing here, and quite frankly, it changes everything.

That Jesus has the name above all names changes everything. For this whole series I have been reading Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 to 20. I want to do it again this morning.

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 By him all things were created, in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be first, preeminent. 19 In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

I hope that text hits differently now, after six weeks of contemplation, after thinking of it through the lens of the resurrection. He is the image of the invisible God. Everything this series has been about — the image we were made to bear, the image idolatry distorts, the image that is bent and broken but not erased within us — it finds its answer here in Jesus. He is not one image among many. He is not the best version. He is the ultimate image, the true icon, the exact living, breathing, embodied representation of the God who made us. Every idol in human history has been a counterfeit of Him, a shadow reaching towards a reality only He can offer.

He is the firstborn of all creation and the firstborn from the dead. We talked about that word firstborn earlier in this series. It is not talking about chronology. It is talking about position, about preeminence. He is the prototype. He is the firstborn of creation — he was there before any of it, the one through whom all of it came into existence. And he is the firstborn from the dead, meaning he is the first to walk out the other side of death into something the world has never seen before. Lazarus was raised from the dead. Jesus was resurrected. Those are very different things. The weight of that — the firstborn from the dead — hits differently on resurrection Sunday, and it should.

That is good because there is one thing we all have in common this morning. We do not like to think about it. It does not feel right to talk about it much of the time, but here is the one thing we all share in common: we are all dying. Every single one of us is going to die. Every human that has ever lived has died, including Jesus. But Jesus did something that nobody else had done. He came out the other side. Jesus walks willingly into death. He places his trust in the Father. He chooses to empty Himself. He goes all the way to the end of it. And He comes out the other side — not resuscitated, not restored to what was, but resurrected, transformed. The firstborn of a new humanity. The first name in a family line that ends differently.

Paul says He does this so that in everything He might be preeminent, first. He does it to restore all that has been broken, to make new all that has been corrupted. The name above every name given to the Son who descended — given because He refused to grasp, given on Easter morning as the Father's verdict over the open hands. That name is not a private possession. It is not locked away in the heavens, inaccessible, reserved for the worthy. The name that Babel could never manufacture and Abraham only received in shadow and promise has been made available to everyone. That is the glory of it. We are not just celebrating that Jesus rose from the dead. We are celebrating that He has now opened a new way for everyone.

Paul writes about this in Romans chapter 10. He is talking about the announcement of the good news, the gospel, and this is what he says: "

9 If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved"

Now I want to make sure we understand what that word saved actually means, because I know that many, if not most, in the room hear that and what we hear is something like: if we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart, then when I die I do not have to go to hell and I get to go someplace called heaven. We think of it forensically. We think of it judicially. I was guilty, now I am innocent. And there are layers of that — there are levels of truth to that. But the word that is actually used here is a Greek word. It is foremost a medical term; a healing term before it is a legal term. It means to rescue and to restore to wholeness, to make well, to recover what has been lost. That is what is offered to us when we come to Jesus.

You and I were made to be image bearers, made to reflect the glory of the living God into the world. And idolatry has corrupted all of us — all the reaching and grasping and building toward the created rather than the Creator, all the times we have made that exchange have bent us, distorted us, hollowed us out. We become less than what we were made to be. Saved means that stops. Saved means the restoration begins.

The image begins to be restored. It means that the bent mirror begins to straighten out. The distortion begins to clear up. Not all at once, not without struggle, but it changes. The trajectory changes. The thing that has been making you less begins to be reversed by the One who comes to make you more. You don't become what you behold because you try harder. You become what you behold because that is simply how image-bearers work. And if beholding idols distorts us and dehumanizes us, then if we behold Jesus, we will be rehumanized — because of who He is, because of what He's done, because of what the Father did with the open hands on Easter morning.

And then Paul says this, and I want you to hear every word of it. He says,

13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Everyone. He doesn't say those who earned it. Not everyone who's figured it out. Not everybody who grew up in church, or has their theology straight, or their life together. That's good news, because there's not one of us in the room that would qualify for any of that. And if you think you do, you're more messed up than you even know. Everyone — every single person, no qualifier, no threshold, no exception.

But this is it: everyone who calls. Not those who deserve, not those who achieve, not those who ascend — those who call. The posture of calling out to the Lord is the opposite of seizing. It's an open hand, not a clenching fist. You don't call on something you've seized. You call on someone you need. You call on someone you trust. You call on someone who can actually help. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. The name above every name. That name is available to everyone, right here and right now.

What a glorious reality. You don't have to build a tower to get to it. In fact, if you build a tower, you'll get farther away from it. You don't have to ascend. You don't have to earn it or achieve it. You just have to call. And then Paul says, "will be saved." It's future tense and in the perfect the outcome is certain. The one who calls will not be turned away. The one who calls will not be told they didn't make the cut. The one who calls on the name of the Lord — the Lord who spoke one word in a garden and a weeping woman knew who He was — that same Lord will call your name, and you will be saved, restored. The process of being rehumanized will begin. He will begin to take the broken pieces and make us whole.

This is what we celebrate on Easter. This is what Jesus came to accomplish. I quoted earlier in this series Irenaeus — he was a second-century Christian and theologian — and this is one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." So God's glory is best expressed in a human being, a man or a woman who is fully and truly alive. This is what we're made for. We're not supposed to be managing our existence. We're not supposed to just survive. We're supposed to thrive. We're made to matter, to be fully alive — fully imaging the one in whose image we are made. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. And the life of man is the vision of God. The way you become fully alive, the way the image gets restored, the way the bent mirror straightens, and the way that we are healed in salvation is by beholding him, by calling to him, by looking to him, by making him the gravitational center of our lives.

It struck me this week — and it's been one of my favorite quotes for the longest time — it struck me for the first time that that's actually a description of Jesus. The glory of God is a man fully alive. That was Jesus. Fully alive, fully in step, fully in tune, walking by faith, only going where the Father sent Him, only saying what the Father spoke, only doing what the Spirit directed Him to do. And His life was glorious — so much so that even when He was put to death, death couldn't hold Him. And when you look and read the life of Jesus, we see He makes the Father the center of everything. He doesn't seize on His own. He doesn't try to make a name for Himself. He does what the Father calls Him to do. Jesus is the first of those who are fully and truly alive — not by grasping, but by receiving, walking by faith and not by sight.

And I want everyone to know that the good news of the gospel is not just that that is true for Jesus — it's that it's true for Jesus, and because it's true for Jesus, it becomes possible for every one of us. The same mechanism that makes idolatry so destructive makes looking to Jesus so good and beautiful. So church, I call you once again — behold the risen and resurrected Christ. Behold the one who went a different way, a better way. Behold the one who refused to seize but received whatever the Father put before Him. Behold Him. Call to Him. And watch what happens as your life is put back together, slowly but surely, by the grace of God, for His glory and for our good. Amen and amen and amen.